The Devoted Mother is the First and Last Line of Defense against Big Brother

Happy Mother’s Day. For me this is a time to contemplate the difference devoted mothers make in our lives. And the difference is much more seismic than it is sentimental. That’s the subject of my lengthy essay at The Federalist this past week. Of all the things we take for granted in this life, the sacrificial love of a mother is at the top of that list. We forget how that bonding has a such a stabilizing and humanizing effect on people — until we are confronted with the depth and breadth of today’s cultural rot.

And the gifts of devoted motherhood are magnified countless times over in the context of an intact family, when the child gains the positive effects of strong and healthy mother-child-father bonds. Unfortunately, broken families and dysfunctional motherhood and fatherhood are epidemic today. So, we ought to ask ourselves: Whom does that brokenness serve? There’s no question in my mind that it serves the bureaucratic, authoritarian State, the source of so many policies that serve to break up families. In a word, the Orwellian monster known as Big Brother. He’s all about separating people and trying to extinguish real love and real beauty.

You can read my article at this link: “A Little Mother Prevents Big Brother.” The 19th century philosopher Edmond Burke wrote about the “little platoons” of society being the ultimate source of all other affections: friendship, community, love of country, love of one’s fellow man. Erase the little platoons, and you’ve erased the source of all human affections. Here’s the relevant Burke quote that I include in my article:

“To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind. The interest of that portion of social arrangement is a trust in the hands of all those who compose it; and as none but bad men would justify it in abuse, none but traitors would barter it away for their own personal advantage.”

Without those bonds to our “little platoons” — which begin in the family, and specifically through the instinctive mother-child bond — there can be no real inter-connectedness. Just a fake and forced “collectivism” that takes the place of love. The instinctive maternal bond has been meddled with, abused and broken through a variety of forces. The sexual revolution plays a huge role, along with the false doctrine of gender ideology and the siren call of government dependency. And when we see how coalitions of big government and big corporations are bullying small businesses and families to bend to the dictates of transgenderism — which has the end effect of abolishing motherhood and fatherhood — we can’t help but see traitors bartering away the family life of others for their own personal advantage, their own power.

But as C.S. Lewis noted in his essay “The Abolition of Man,” we owe a great debt to the “beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses.”

Let’s try to shore up the remaining sanity by shoring up the strength of our little platoons and injecting them with a fresh and heavy dose of such obstinacy. Let’s celebrate and encourage the devoted and sacrificial love of our mothers to help them deliver that antidote against the poisons of Big Brother.